Raja Parasuraman has created an important book on how the brain attends. The volume freezes for an instant the rapidly growing area of biologically oriented studies of attention. Readers of Acta Psychologica will appreciate the cognitive neuroscience approach taken by virtually all the authors, i.e. an integration of conceptual approaches from experimental psychology and neuropsychology with neuroscience. Well-developed event-related potential techniques are covered as well as newer functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) techniques. Neurochemical and psychopharmacological approaches, primarily using animal models, are also included. Furthermore, attention is considered from the perspectives of development, ageing, and psychiatric and neurologic pathology. Forty-three leading investigators have combined to produce 23 chapters.

Despite the usual diversity of an edited book, a number of themes successfully emerge from the volume viewed in its entirety. A first theme is the accumulating evidence that visual attention activates the same cortical areas involved in visual perception, in some cases by inhibiting competing visual fields. The separation of object attention and perception in the so-called ventral stream from spatial attention in the so-called dorsal stream is well represented. These findings lead to a second theme: care in the interpretation of brain changes as either an effect of an attention mechanism or an attention mechanism per se. Can we observe a network of structures that define one or more attention mechanisms? Might attention be such a local and distributed process that we can only observe its effects? A third theme is related again primarily to visual attention although the problem is common to our overall perceptual experience. How do we bind together a percept from the different neural representations that appear to exist? The status of attention as an answer to this question was discussed ably from different perspectives, most notably the pathological perspective provided by patients with visual neglect. In general, the volume provides the reader with a great deal of emerging information on the brain and attention.

A few minor deficits should be noted, if only to suggest that my reading was not too sloppy. The initial section on ‘Cognitive Neuroscience Methods’ fell short of providing a thorough introduction to methods. Most of the authors chose to introduce their methodology very briefly and then discuss their recent findings. These chapters remain worthwhile, but taken as a whole the reader knows very little about each cognitive neuroscience method at the end of the section. The section would have been more satisfying if it had been titled, ‘Illustrative findings with different cognitive neuroscience approaches’. The volume is better than the usual edited volume with regard to the usual reviewers’ complaints: uneven quality of the chapters, copy-editing oversights, under inclusiveness in some areas, and over inclusiveness in others.

Moving to more detailed comments, Parasuraman is to be complimented on producing a single author edited book, a useful introductory overview and a crisp title, The Attentive Brain. The author of the chapter on the development of attention, Johnson, recognised this as well and produced the next best title, “Developing an attentive brain”. Parasuraman and his colleagues also contributed two excellent review chapters on vigilance and changes in selective attention with dementia. The latter chapter touches on ageing and together with Johnson’s brief but useful chapter on development provide a weak rationale for titling one section of the book, ‘Development and pathologies of attention’. The pathologies are covered fairly well. Rafal provides a review of neglect that combines a careful clinical description of forms of neglect with a careful description of experimental observations. This section of the volume is rounded out by a seeming committee report on attention within attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder and a chapter on schizophrenia by Nestor and O’Donnell. The latter starts with a fine review of event-related potential work that is then followed by a conceptual comment and wiring diagram that are interesting, but not well integrated with the rest of the chapter.

After the Introduction, the initial section of the volume is the one on Cognitive Neuroscience Methods. Visual attention is described quite fully in this section from the perspectives of neuroanatomy (Webster & Ungerleider), single and multi-cell neurophysiology (Motter), electrophysiology (Luck & Girelli), PET (Corbetta), and fMRI (Haxby, Courtney, & Clark). These chapters address somewhat similar questions in visual attention and the reader should compare the information gained from the different techniques. Two other chapters are also relevant but do not cluster as well. One by Swick and Knight describes their extensive work with brain lesioned patients and deals more extensively with prefrontal function than the chapters in the rest of the section. The other chapter by Niebur and Koch nicely develops the rationale for computational approaches to attention and provides an overview, but does not detail a specific approach. The final two chapters in this section illustrate how the measures determine the content of study. Marrocco and Davidson discuss the neurochemistry of attention and focus in particular on work with alertness and selective spatial attention. This and the chapter by Robbins in the next section show how neurochemical information provides a different, enriching view on the physiology of attention. They also show, however, how much more we need to know about this area.